EDUCATIONAL TECHNOLOGY ADVISORY
COMMITTEE
June 18, 2008

ATTENDEES: David Gillett, Duncan Graham, Beth Grobman, Jeanie Hawk, Scott Heffner, Stan Judkins, Sheri Mines, Judy Mowrey, Fred Sherman, Alex Swanner, Pamela Wilkes, Tim Woods

GUESTS: Bob Barr, Chien Shih

Convened:  12:35pm

1. APPROVAL OF THE MINUTES (Fred)

• Will stand approved as posted

2.  GENERAL NEWS (ALL)

• Abaca – just finished the Phase I testing

  The results are very positive except for a few procedural changes, which shouldn't delay the scheduled roll out
  Phase II will begin on Friday, which will put the whole District in a testing mode
  Will not notice anything performance wise
  Will receive an e-mail each morning that you have e-mails in your quarantine in box

  Will be able to take action to either release to your in box or delete from the quarantine
  Quarantined mail will stay in your in box for 30 days before it is automatically deleted
  E-mails are rated by their quality and in general, e-mails rated less than 1 are usually spam
  If Spam gets by the filter and into your in box, you can take action by forwarding the message that you received to the following email address:  spam@abaca.com

  The Abaca service will know that when you submit a message to spam@abaca.com, you are reporting the email address as spam to be blocked

  Before going into the trial test period, ETS took a snapshot before acquiring Abaca and after in order to be able to monitor Abaca's effectiveness

3. HARDWARE/SOFTWARE STANDARDS (Sharon/Fred)

• Last meeting held on June 10, 2008
• Discussed the Meeting Maker update

  There has been a problem that has been encountered between Meeting Maker and the Leopard operating system for the MAC

  Things are not displayed correctly in Meeting Maker

  Have contacted People Cube (makers of Meeting Maker) and ask them what could be done
  We are currently using version 8.5
  The newest released version 8.7 came out a few days ago
  Have delayed moving to more current versions of the software due to the difficulties encountered at the lat upgrade

  May have to upgrade to new version due to the fact that:
  1) It would cost too much (starting cost $20K) to have People Cube convert 8.5 to fix the Leopard problem
  2) Without 1 being an option, would have to install Parallels (an IBM emulation) on all MACs with Leopard

  Looking very seriously at going right to version 8.7

  Now in the process of putting it on a server and testing it out to see what glitches can be found at our end before rolling it out
  Will do an update at our next meeting
  Version 8.7 has support for Blackberry and Palm devices

  No integration for the iPhone at this time

  Tim Woods ask if the cost ramifications had been looked at if we established an exchange server

  Looking at Outlook since it is on all of our client systems

  Has been discussed and it is something that needs to be seriously looked at
  In the short run, it is better to convert to Meeting Maker 8.7 and in about a year start to look at this as a project

  Stan brought up the fact that if we are going to implement a new version of Meeting Maker, that we should go to a new server since the current one is about 6 years old

• Discussed the Fujitsu tablet donation

  DA got a donation from Fujitsu of $500K for new tablet computers

  The question that was brought up was – "How should we make, or should we make the Fujitsu system a district wide standard?" (This would be an addition not a replacement to the standards)

  The issues have to do with the licensing costs since the version of Microsoft Windows that needs to be used with these computers is not included in our district wide Microsoft Agreement

  Need to maintain each individual license for each individual machine so we can't image out
  Are contacting Microsoft to see if we can include this in our district wide agreement
  Also talking to Fujitsu to see if there is anything they can do at their end

  According to Jeanine, DA is hopeful that the Fujitsu tablets can be considered when refreshing computers for faculty

4. EIS UPDATE (Chien)

• There are two important milestone dates coming up

  1) August 15^th – will release the detailed implementation plan

  Will indicate the project going forward for the next three years
  Will give a realistic view by blocking off all the college black off days (i.e. finals, registration)

  2) Opening Day, September 18^th – will have three sessions, similar to a mini Banner Summit

  Will be a hands on view of what Banner is

• Have finalized the RFP implementation consulting team

  The committee has recommended SunGard rather than SIG because of the following the reasons:
  1) The price – SunGard was $1.4M lower than SIG
  2) SunGard projected 15,463 hours over the three year period, while SIG proposed 21,979 hours

  Checked with Coast Community College who is similar in size to us and currently in the tail end of their Banner implementation and they spent about 14,000 hours in implementation

  Since we already have a standing contract with SunGard, we can start to use SunGard's service and have planned to begin using their consultants before August 15^th

  They will come on campus for at least one week and do project planning with all the different teams
  Will also do a project definition document

  Will define in detail the expectations from each department as well as what SunGard will be doing

• After August 15^th, we will have the first delivery of hardware
• The official module implementation is:

  1) FR – will be finished by July of 2009
  2) HR – will start in January 2009 and take about one year
  3) SI – will start in March of 2009 and take about one and a half years

  Entire project should be complete by the end of 2011

• Entire schedule will be posted to the EIS website (http://www.fhda.edu/eis/)

  Will do briefings through town hall meetings on both campuses

5. HYPERION UPDATE (Bob)

• Finishing with phase I

  Development of a Hyperion system that would replace and do exactly what the current MAUI system does

  Needed to be done because:
  1) The middleware that supports the MAUI system is no longer supported by the vendor
  2) The new Intel MAC's will not run the MAUI system
  3) People who had PC's had no access to MAUI

• Over the summer will contact individual users instead of having a big announcement, to set them up on the new system and introduce them to the MAUI replacements reports that have been created for the new system
• Sent out an on-line survey to all individuals that have Peach accounts for the purpose of identifying current MAUI users and to determine which of the current MAUI reports they were using and any concerns they may have regarding the move from the MAUI system to the Hyperion system

  75 people responded with no surprises

  Over the next month and a half will set these individuals up with accounts

  Have created reports that all of the respondents will use

• This system will initially start out through a remote terminal access

  This will allow access to the Hyperion tool and the Hyperion reports

• Have already converted the FR and HR databases to SQL databases
• Have replaced the SI RDB database with the data warehouse
• Will open up secondary roll out in the fall
• If people stick to the current MAUI replacement reports that have been created, there will be very little need for training
• On opening day, plan to do a session that will provide information on the new system for Maui users
• One set of reports that has not been created are the list reports

  Ad hoc reports where you are provided with several lists of variables and you mix and match and get a report

  This type of setup is hard to duplicate directly in Hyperion
  For these types of reports, will work with the user directly to create a custom or semi custom report for them

• Have gotten pretty good at creating these reports

  At the beginning it was a steep learning curve

• Phase II will begin in the fall

  Will provide some training in the Hyperion tool for those users that are semi advanced to advanced users
  For more advanced users will be able to create templates that are not so much the point and click type that are available for the MAUI replacements
  With MAUI, on the SI side, you could only query one term at a time so there will be additional reports created that will allow a user to compare a number of terms in a single report
  Will look to pushing this out to a web server as opposed to the remote terminal

• Originally chose the terminal method so that the experience for both the MAC users and the PC users would be exactly identical. 
• Any new machine will be able to access Hyperion

  WIN machines come with a program called remote terminal
  New MAC's have an equivalent program that comes with their OS
  Do have to make a visit to the users office to do a little set up

• Databases are exactly the same for MAUI and Hyperion

The FR databases have the same tables that connect up the same way, because we are going to the new EIS in two years
The database for the SI side will be a well-designed warehouse with 12 or more years of information in it

6. WIRELESS UPDATE (Sharon/Fred)

• Currently in a beta test on both campuses with regard to wireless authentication

  Beta test of the hardware and the software directly connected as opposed to just getting wireless connectivity
  Will authenticate users onto the network – have to do because of CALEA (wire tapping law)

  Once we get the authentication process down, we will have a private network and are not subject to CALEA

  Have not encountered any technical difficulties with the authentications process and plan to complete it by June

• After completion of the beta testing, will meet with both colleges to determine priorities with regard to where they want wireless to be rolled out
• There will open access to wireless connectivity within the libraries and the dinning areas that will not require authentication

  All other areas of the campuses will require authentication

7. SECURITY PROCEDURES REVIEW (Fred)

• The committee reviewed the Electronic Information Security Policy

  In the second paragraph there was the suggestion to change the word moral to ethical
  Grammar correction – Federal was capitalized in the paragraph but not the bullet

• Fred moved to ratify the document with the minor changes so it could move forward

  Tim moved to ratify the document and Scott seconded it
  Motion passed by acceptance of the committee

8.  PROCEDURE FOR DISTRIBUTING POLICIES THROUGH THE GOVERANCE PROCESS (Fred)

• Polices will be taken to the CAC – because it has representatives from each advisory group – for discussion, review and ratification and then on to the Board for approval

  The policy will go to the committee once for general information and the leaders will take the document back to their groups

  They will come back to the next CAC meeting with specific suggestions, comments, concerns, etc.

  Changes are made and then it is brought back one more time and eventually approved by the committee

9.  ETAC MEMBERSHIP REVIEW (Fred)

• Currently have:

  Academic Senate – 2 members from each campus
  Administrative Staff – 2 members from each campus
  Classified Senate – 2 members from each campus and one from CS
  Students – 1 student from each campus
  One FA rep
  Chair – Vice Chancellor of Technology
  A couple of Ex-Officio members – staff of the CTO along with Dave Gillett (ETS Security Engineer)

• Currently have openings for both student positions and one classified member from the FH Classified Senate

10. DAY & TIME FOR 08/09 ETAC MEETINGS

• Currently meeting on the third Wednesday of each month from 12:30PM – 2:00PM

  Suggestion made to change the meeting time to the 2^nd Wednesday of each month, at the same time

  The committee agreed upon this new time
  This new time will begin with the November meeting

11.  FUTURE AGENDA ITEMS (ALL)

• Discussion on new policies and procedures for the way labs are supported by ETS

  Standard on how computers are handled by ETS in a lab

  Imaging of software
  The way accounts are set up
  Security issues

  Stan to write down specific issues that he has seen
  Judy Mowrey feels that there is a need for a lab users group – DA had one on an Ad Hoc basis
  Jeanine Hawk mentioned that at the Tech Tack Force meetings there had been some discussion about the IA (Instructional Associates) committee and the Tech Tack Force committee coming together in some way

  As far as Fred knew, they were going to continue with this committee

  Fred will check with Sharon since she was unable to attend today's ETAC meeting

12. ADJOURNMENT

• Adjourned:  1:55 pm

Next Meeting: Wednesday, October 15, 2008, via video conferencing